


What Magic Can Do

by Chocolatepot



Category: The Secret Garden (1993), The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Post-World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:49:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21840781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chocolatepot/pseuds/Chocolatepot
Summary: When Dickon finally came home from the war, Uncle Archie held a Demobilization Fete for the village.
Relationships: Mary Lennox/Dickon Sowerby
Comments: 14
Kudos: 138
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	What Magic Can Do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shoemaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoemaster/gifts).



> So glad to find another Mary/Dickon shipper! I hope this scratches the itch for you.

When Dickon finally came home from the war, Uncle Archie held a Demobilization Fete for the village. Too many boys hadn't returned, but those that had were welcomed with songs, sweets, and open arms. It took Mary an hour to settle on a dress – white lawn, embroidered with white silk roses on the bosom, and tucked around the skirt and sleeves – and then she had to arrange her hair, curling it into a knot at the back of her head and puffing it out near her cheeks.

Colin was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs in the hall, wearing a tan linen suit and fretting. He had been worrying over the fete for a week, coming to Mary's room at night to air his fears about being hated by the Sowerbys for not having been drafted like two of their boys or having enlisted like two more.

"The Sowerbys will understand more than anyone else," she told him twice. "You're not dying anymore, but you're not exactly healthy, either." He had been deferred into local war work, sitting in an office and moving papers about. "It's everyone else in the village you should worry about – the people who don't know you. Especially the ones who worked here when you were little and don't like you."

"Thank you very much," he snapped.

But this afternoon he didn't speak, just frowned and glowered. He still gave her his arm, though, and they walked slowly down the lawn to the fete.

Mary was planning to look out for Dickon and greet him when she was ready, but she as she waited in line at the tea tent a soldier turned around and – there he was.

_"It's too bad there isn't more of a social circle here for you," Uncle Archie had said the night before at their quiet family dinner. "You're a young lady now, you ought to be going to dances and such with young gentlemen."_

_"I don't mind, uncle. I'd rather just be with you and Colin, anyway."_

_"But you won't always. You'll want to be married at some point, have your own house and children. And there aren't any other county families in twenty miles, just tenant farmers. Perhaps I should rent a house in Halifax after the summer."_

They next met in the garden – their garden – by moonlight. She had been reading in her room, but felt an irresistible urge to go out into the cool night air; she put on the same white dress and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. Nothing stirred in the darkness of the house as she passed, and when she reached the hall door she found her feet drawn to the familiar gravel paths. The air outdoors was balmy and sweet-smelling, particularly next to the broken old tree covered with clinging roses, and she closed her eyes to breathe it in.

“Don’t tha’ move,” came a voice from behind her. “Tha’ looks a right picture with the starlight in thy hair.”

Mary smiled before opening her eyes. “I thought you might come. Did Martha write to you again?”

“She wrote me a lot, about a lot of things.” When she turned, he had his hands in the pockets of a plain, everyday suit, and the plain, honest look he had always worn on his face, which made her smile. “I missed th’ place.”

“And me?”

“Aye, an’ Colin.”

A breeze stirred, brushing a rose against her cheek, and she reached up to push it back without looking away from Dickon. “I missed you a great deal, you know.”

“Aye?”

“ _Aye._ I thought of you – of seeing you again, especially in the garden. Alone.”

There was a long silence. This was bolder than she had been in her goodbye to him as he went out with his regiment – she had just been a girl, then – and bolder than she had been in her letters afterward, which were mostly filled with domestic information about her family, and of course reports about what she was planting and how it was thriving or failing, but although she had never been so bold, every line of them had been infused with the innermost feelings of her heart. She could tell that he sensed it and that it made him uneasy, but he didn’t make an excuse and leave. To sustain her boldness, she stepped nearer to him.

“I shouldn’ve come,” he said finally, still without leaving. “It isn’t right, me bein’ here with thysen at this hour o’ th’ night.”

“It is right,” Mary insisted. “It’s the most right – it’s the graideliest thing that’s happened to me in years.” The moonlight burnished his ruddy hair and gave his face a mournful gravity it rarely held in the day, at least before he went to the Continent; it was beyond her ability to know that it added a luminous ethereality to the promised beauty she had grown into, which made it as impossible for Dickon to look away from her as it was for her to look away from him.

“I’m not th’ proper sort to be – I mean, thy uncle’d run me off th’ land if he knew …” He did not finish the thought to explain what it was that Archibald Craven would disapprove of, but it wasn’t necessary. “Tha’ can’t think he’d be best pleased.”

“I suppose not.” There was another long silence, and the nighttime noises of the garden hovered around them. Nearby, there was a bank of white poppies bobbing in the breeze, seeming to gossip among themselves cheerily about the scene before them without judgment, while the roses and lilies nodded in agreement. “But I think – oh, please say you won’t think me childish for it, but I think the Magic would help. It made him come back years ago, didn’t it? And Colin became well again, and I became, oh, such a better little girl. I think it could make him understand – things.”

“Things?” Dickon said, with a wry smile.

“You know very well what I mean,” Mary began indignantly, and was cut off when he bent down to kiss her rosy lips.


End file.
